


negotiations

by stellatiate



Series: because it hurts [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Consensual Infidelity, F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 04:15:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1154766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellatiate/pseuds/stellatiate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they cannot always discuss these sorts of things with works and compromises alone. not safe for work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	negotiations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beanaroony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanaroony/gifts).



> this was meant to be pwp but thanks to my overactive imagination, it has spiraled out of my control. goddamnit. i gift this to bean because she made fabulous art for this particular part [here](http://stellatiate.tumblr.com/post/68747632537/).

“I see you’re back at your  _games_  again,” he breathes down the column of her neck, his hand moving from the small of her back and curving over her spine, fingers brushing through the tangled curls, tickling around the nape of her neck. Katara laughs tauntingly, her nails biting into the edge of the desk, and when she flips her hair over her shoulder to look at him, Zuko can feel the tight press of her hips fitted over his own.

Katara has grown in the past year, in ways he suspects the young Avatar to be completely incapable of noticing; she is all sweetly fluttering lashes and cheek kisses and fiercely protective, but when she must shed that persona, she is a deadly tidal wave with hips blessed by a pendulum-swing.

Her eyes betray her deviance, her voice low and grating, “I get very bored,” she turns, drags him backwards until he is standing between the gap of her legs, “ _very_  easily, Fire Lord Zuko.”

Zuko grins at the way she trails her hands up the armored pads of his arms, already leaning down by the time she loops them around his neck and inches him closer to kiss him. They have dealt with this, in even paces. Zuko remembers the very first thought he had, while her healing water still glimmered across his stretchmark scar, about calming her trembling lips with his own. But the astounding end of it all is that Mai kisses him, and he is happy, and Katara kisses Aang, and  _they_  are happy.

But they are not  _this_ , they are not bound by soul and body the way Zuko and Katara are, the way he suspects they always have been (since maybe, he was the one to burn himself into the columns of her wrists, and she was the one to lay her spirit down in touches on the husk of his scar).

They are sorry, too; they are almost always sorry, each and every time (but sorry does not stop it).

Katara scoots back against the desk, fingers moving along the lines of his armor. Zuko knows she can unclasp it all, shed the omniscience that comes with it, but she moves slowly, so he threads his fingers through her hair, taps them against the side of her face thoughtfully.

“Tell me something,” he says as she pulls at the heavy mantle around his shoulders, but Katara scrapes her nails along his hips, not bothering to toy with the layers draped over his trousers. Bright eyes flicker up towards him, and Katara sighs as if there is some unbearable weight dropping inside of her chest.

He doesn’t stop her from dragging her nails down the sides of his hips, jagged lines against his thighs; no, he moves in tandem, wide palms sliding over her leggings, cinching his fingers inside of the lining of her sarashi and rolling it over her hips, down her thighs. It is a temporarily awkward overlap of arms and clothes, but Zuko knows they cannot move with the soft slowness of lovers because they should not be.

Katara rests her hands on his shoulders and he can feel the way her body sings with tension, with anticipation as he guides himself between her legs. But she is the one to clamp cool fingers around his erection, hook the heels of her feet against the backs of his thighs. “There’s nothing to tell, Zuko,” her voice is gritty with something two parts sadness, one part nostalgia, “this doesn’t have to hurt.”

No, it doesn’t, because when he pushes himself into her, it might feel like she claws through the thin fabric of his tunic, but it is a tether; it might sound like a wounded, painful cry, but he knows what pleasure sounds like, too. His hands fall from her waist, slap down against the scattered papers on the desk, and when he thrusts forward, his head knocks into hers slightly.

“Were you actually— _ah_ —going to—” Katara edges her mouth along his, trails across his cheekbone until her face is nestled against his, arms and legs wrapped around him, a timeless, synchronized rocking between their bodies; she feels like suffocation, like the moment before you realize that gasp was your last breath, like he could plummet into a darkness surrounded by this feeling.

“Not unless you made me,” he mumbles, jerks his hips forward, thighs bumping clumsily against the desk, “I wouldn’t.” Zuko feels Katara’s mouth on his throat and all it does is making him coil his fist into the loose fabric of her tunic, wedge his other hand against her thigh to spread her further along his desk.

She moans, and he grits his teeth at the tempting sound of it.

“This is a real problem, Katara,” he breathes, pulls her hips until he can see it rattle her, see her biting her lip and digging her fingers into his skin, the way she twitches against him and her body convulses in attempts to spew out signs of pleasure, “if I overstep, if I don’t handle it, then Aang promised,  _you_  promised—”

Katara’s whines shift into a dull roar, into hot anger as she claws through his clothes and snaps her head back, electrifying blue eyes narrowed at him. “He can’t,” she hisses out, breathing frantically and shoving her hips down the desk, hands splaying at her side and knocking things about, “he won’t, I won’t,  _no one_ —how could I have promised— _no_.”

Her thumb smooths across his scar, and a moan tumbles past her lips, and no, he’d rather not die (and there had been some inexplicable part of him that broke when Katara nodded her approval, because  _she_  had been the one to stitch him, bloody, back together on the cusp of a new world). Something lingers, sticky and warm, but Zuko doesn’t think about it; he latches his hands around her hips and focuses on the bitter thing between them, the distance and the relationship and the  _promise_ , and drives his hips deeper, as if he could break it apart.

…

Aang touches his fingers to the hollow of Zuko’s cheek, a startling motion for a precarious friend, and Katara’s hands are knotted in the loose ends of her tunic, rubbing at a blotted stain in the back. “Maybe you need a break,” the young Avatar says, and Zuko watches his fingers come away with the same ink-black on Katara’s clothes, and he hopes it is the only stain that attests to what they were  _really_  doing.

“Ink,” he mumbles, scrubs his hand against his cheek in an attempt to ignore the way Katara’s eyes fall on him.

“It gets everywhere, doesn’t it?” She says wryly, and it’s all the decency he has in the world not to laugh.


End file.
